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I soldiered through every episode of the inaugural season of Girls. I felt watching it was my Millennial duty. I will not be making the same mistake when season two premieres on HBO tonight. My blood pressure can't take it. Sure, a show focused on the exploits of privileged young(ish) white people in New York is nothing new, but at least the frivolity of Friends wasn't heralded as the television totem of a generation and the characters of Seinfeld blatantly reveled in their pettiness and unlikeability. And despite the fact that I personally refuse to accept that my early twenties sisters are mired in such a self-obsessed morass of bad sex (if you're under 30 and haven't heard of Betty Dodson, you need to fix that), dead-end pseudo-relationships, social dysthymia and clueless narcissism that they believe Lena Dunham's opus is "OMG, SO REAL," there are actually objective measures by which Girls utterly fails to accurately capture the reality of the Gen Y experience it's been lauded as embodying. This show is no generational shibboleth. To wit:

No one lives at home

A third of Millennials have lived at home at some point during the Great Recession, but the characters on Girls all live on their own, despite the fact that the show takes place in the most expensive city in America and the majority of them aren't working the kind of jobs that could support independent lifestyles - if they're working at all. Parental subsidies might be somewhat commonplace during these tough economic times, but they more often come in the form of room and board vs. bankrolling their children's citified lifestyles. This brings me to the next point: